izigame.me

A misguided sequel that switched genres and didn't even do a good job at catering to the new audience. If you liked Shadow Warrior 2013, you won't like this one. It disappoints the fans of the previous game by not being the same genre, and disappoints its intended looter shooter target audience by being a bad representation of it. It's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint but with a head start.
Objective positives:
▲ Redundancies in the controls have been fixed and there's less contextual ambiguity
Subjective positives:
► Added co-op
► Mana is now a thing so you can no longer just spam magical powers
► New movement mechanics make navigation less restrictive
Subjective negatives:
◄ Thoughtfully designed levels with intuitive direction have been replaced by bland procedural generation with no direction. The objective indicator arrow is now mandatory because you have no idea where you're going without it.
◄ A small set of significant upgrades with balanced economy that requires smart choices has been replaced by a never-ending barrage of insignificant junk loot that you'll have to spend hours juggling around
◄ Semi-tastefully over-the-top weapon design has been replaced by absolute dedication to unfunny tryhardism
◄ Basic but satisfyingly effective weapon usage has been replaced by boring stat-wankery and an unironic MISS CHANCE
◄ The stats are unbalanced and if you even slightly try to optimize you become overpowered
◄ Stereotypically Unreal3-esque high contrast of the first game has been replaced by eye-searingly awful omnipresent visual effects that constantly interfere with your ability to perceive literally anything
◄ Inscrutable combat rating system that at least tried to encourage variety of gameplay has been replaced by nothing. The only reason to do anything different is enemy elemental weakness, and even that isn't significant enough
◄ The only consequence for dying is that the enemies that killed you have their health restored, except if it's a boss fight because then there's no consequence at all. You can just bash your head against them and repeatedly die in order to defeat them
◄ A crafting system that destroys three items and spends money to spawn a completely random item of similar level. The properties of the items used don't affect the one spawned, except if it's elemental modifiers. If you go farm items instead you will gain money as well as XP.
◄ An upgrade system that uses ridiculous amounts of a rare currency you can only get from grinding boring challenge gauntlets
◄ Prevalence of human enemies makes non-human enemies seem more pathetic
◄ Wang used to be a prick to those who deserve it. Now he's just a prick for no reason to everyone around him
◄ All of the emotional baggage of the previous game was thrown into the trash and now everything is just annoying, crappy, a joke or an annoying crappy joke
◄ Non-human characters have been over-humanized and grounded so they are no longer interesting
◄ No more cool hand-painted parallax slideshow cutscenes
Objective negatives:
▼ "Hold any key to skip cutscene" can cause you to miss content if you keep holding movement keys. There should be a dedicated key.
▼ Finishing the final mission leaves an autosave where all NPCs have despawned and you can't do any side quests anymore. The autosave should happen before accepting the final mission so that players who actually want to keep playing this would get to continue side content without restarting progress
FYI: I actually played this game for about 20 hours but Steam does not count offline playtime.